


above the thorn the bud

by recoveringrabbit



Series: all great words [8]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, also their daughter, it isn't a kid fic but there is a child, so be aware
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-01
Updated: 2017-06-01
Packaged: 2018-11-07 20:03:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11066142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: In which FitzSimmons discuss why hermitage is not something they'd encourage their daughter to pursue.[a brief character study]





	above the thorn the bud

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MyOwnLittleCorner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnLittleCorner/gifts).



> Happy Graduation, sister! This seems fitting since I wrote my first FitzSimmons fic in your first year. Obviously, I'll continue to write more, but. <3

Georgie hardly glances at him as she comes in from school, her curly pigtails hanging dejectedly over each shoulder and her book bag dragging along the ground. “Hey,” he says, turning off the kitchen tap, “how did your project go?”

“All right.”

Her lack of enthusiasm alarms him, especially considering she had been vibrating with excitement about it during breakfast. He hurriedly dries his hands with a tea towel to be ready for any eventuality. “Did everything work like it should?”

“Yes.” She swings her bag onto the kitchen table and shrugs off her red school cardigan. “Everything worked the way it always does. Is Archie home yet?”

“No,” he says, “he’s got Young Astronomers this afternoon. Did you want to wait for him to have tea?”

“No.” She sighs. “I’m going to my room, then. I’m not hungry anyway.”

Not hungry? Something is very wrong—both their children take after him on an appetite front. Is she sick? “Hold up.” Dropping to one knee to snag her as she tries to slip past, he chucks her gently under the chin. “Could there be a hug for dear old Da?”

When she raises her eyes to meet his, the world-weariness they hold makes him suck in a breath. “Sorry, Da,” she says briefly, and gives him a perfunctory one-armed embrace. Her cheek is slightly sticky against his neck. Putting two and two together, Fitz doesn’t let her go so quickly, wrapping both arms around her and folding her into his chest. Whatever it is that has hurt his daughter’s heart, he knows the only remedy is contact with another one.

“You don’t have to be sorry, sweetheart. I’m just glad to see you.”

Her little head falls familiarly onto his shoulder and her whole body sags against him, burrowing in like a chick. “You saw me this morning.”

“So?” he asks lightly, tugging gently at one of her tails. “I’m always glad to see you.”

She scoffs, a sound far too mature to be coming from her nine-year-old body. “You have to say that because you’re my dad.”

“I have to say it because it’s true,” he corrects, a hypothesis slowly forming as to what exactly has upset her. “Days when I don’t see you are miserable. I’m cross with everyone. Ask Mack next time you see him. Or Aunt Daisy, she’ll tell you the truth in gory detail.” That earns him an almost-laugh, and he slides his hand to cradle her head. “Getting to be your dad is just a bonus.”

She doesn’t respond to that except to snuggle in closer, and Fitz lets his eyes drift close for a second. Then the door opens again, more forcefully, and he glances up to see his wife wearing the pursed-lip, blazing-eyed expression that bodes no good for anyone. She answers his silent question with a quick shake of her head. He nods, adjusting his arms around Georgie so he can lift her as he gets to his feet. “Sure you don’t want a snack?” he whispers, loudly enough that Jemma can hear him. “There’s brownies with raspberries in them. One of your five a day right there. Even Mum can’t argue.”

Georgie rolls her head to look at him. “Maybe a brownie. And milk?”

“That can be arranged.” He kisses her forehead, then lets her slide to the ground. She’s really too heavy for him, but he’ll keep holding her as long as she allows it. “We got your Amazon order today. It’s in the lab already.”

That makes her eyes shine like nothing else can, and she stops long enough to exchange her school shoes for a lab-approved pair before she goes whirling out the back door, calling to an enthusiastically barking Mops as she runs. Fitz watches her through the window until he’s confident she’s well out of earshot, then turns to Jemma and voices the question he had kept silent earlier. “Did it happen again?”

She nods, her eyes shooting sparks. “Oh yes. For the fourth time this year, our daughter has been politely informed that she was mistaken in assuming that her best friend was, in fact, a friend at all, having misinterpreted the politeness due a lab partner for the explicit overtures of friendship. I mean, I always ate every single lunch with my lab partner and invited them to my house and planned matching hairstyles, didn’t you?”

“Only when my lab partner was actually my best friend and future wife—except, er, the matching hairstyles.”

On a roll, she doesn’t even acknowledge his comment. “And, insult to injury, rotten Primrose didn’t even have the guts to tell Georgie to her face! She apparently sent Oliver as messenger with a note on _heart-shaped stationary_ , which is how we know anything about it—he watched Georgie burst into tears and mentioned it to Miss Smith. They called myself and Cressida in to ‘inform us of the situation between our daughters’ and, ugh, Fitz, you should have _seen_ the simpering arrogance on that woman, she isn’t sorry at all and will do _nothing_ to rectify the situation—”

The whole time she’s been speaking, he’s been inching closer to her, and now he puts his hands on her shoulders and does the same thing to her as he had done to Georgie. Like their daughter, Jemma calms almost instantly, notching her head into her spot on his shoulder and bringing her arms around the small of his back. “It isn’t _fair_ , Fitz,” she says bitterly into his jumper. “Georgie is so lovely; I can’t understand why this keeps happening to her.”

He’s asked himself the same question each of the previous three times it’s happened, and he’s no closer to an answer. Bias aside, Georgie is smart and funny and kind and interesting and an all-around delight; he is baffled that she can’t keep a friend longer than the duration of a school assignment. _We’re cursed_ , he thinks reflexively, but this isn’t the time for that joke.

“I’m almost,” Jemma says, less bitter but just as tired, “tempted to tell her to give up. She keeps opening herself up and being hurt because of it. Surely it would be better not to try.”

Fitz stiffens, pulling away to meet Jemma’s eye. “You don’t believe that.”

“No,” she sighs, but then her face hardens. “Only, why not, Fitz? Georgie has Archie and that’s more than either of us had. We’re all right.”

“Now,” he says, “but we can’t bank on Georgie finding the person she’s going to spend the rest of her life with at sixteen. It doesn’t work that way. And”—he continues over her objection—“Archie will have his own life, too. Anyway, they aren’t interested in complementary disciplines.”

“Apparently we can’t bank on Georgie finding a person at all.”

“No,” he agrees, “but we shouldn’t give up hope just yet. Maybe all the girls in Year Four are horrible, but she hasn’t tried any of the boys, and there’s still secondary school. That’s an entirely new pool.”

“Oh, you’re right of course.” She makes a frustrated noise, more at the situation than at him, and returns to his arms. “I’m just so tired of watching her cry, Fitz.”

“Me too.” He kisses the top of her head and they are silent, each lost in their own thoughts. Jemma, he guesses, is thinking of her long lonely years before they were paired up in chem lab and trying to create a plan to avoid that same fate for their daughter. No doubt by the time they go to bed she’ll have researched pen pals or science holiday camps or something else to give Georgie a different chance. Jemma has always sought doggedly for solutions to problems—it’s one of the many reasons she’s a brilliant scientist, and one of the many reasons he loves her—but all their years of slow healing haven’t been able to fully convince her that some problems don’t have solutions. Not in that way. Sometimes, Fitz knows, you just have to learn to breathe through the pain.

“How do you do it?”

She’s propped her chin against his chest and is regarding him levelly, her eyebrows drawn together. He peers down his nose. “Do what?”

“Not give up on people. This has happened to Georgie four times in her short life, but it’s happened to you—” She closes her eyes briefly, tightening her lips. “Oh, _so_ many times, and so much worse. And yet you never stop giving people the benefit of the doubt. If I were you I would have become a hermit.”

“No you wouldn’t,” he says. “You’d get bored with no one to talk to.” She only looks at him, unamused, and he relents, twitching his mouth to one side as he thinks. He knows the answer. Unlike most ingrained behaviours, this one is an active choice, and he has to think about it every time he stands at the crossroads. He just doesn’t know how to explain it.

“My mum,” he says finally, “when my father left, she said: just because one rose pricks you, it doesn’t mean you should stop picking them.”

Jemma’s eyes take on the hard anger that always appears when he mentions his father, and he strokes her shoulder with his thumb to bring her back.

“I didn’t know what she meant then,” he continues. “I just thought, well, I had one parent who hurt me and another one who loved me—fifty percent isn’t bad, is it? And that was just two people, so maybe the odds were actually higher than I had observed. I had teachers who were kind. The older students in my classes were decent to me. Really, I thought, what did I have to lose by expecting that most people wouldn’t be awful?” He shrugs. “And then, you know, I was mostly right. Most people aren’t awful.”

“But the ones who are,” she persists. “You give them chance after chance to be different even though they never change. How do you do that?”

His throat telescopes together as her careful question conjures up the many ghosts that haunt him, even still. Jemma’s hand comes up to rest over his heart, reminding him as it always does that she will keep it safe with all the might she can muster—he knows by now how much that is. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to.”

“No, it’s all right.” Letting out a slow breath, he offers her half of a deprecating smile. “Something else Mum said. You know I think she’s the font of all wisdom.”

“She is,” Jemma says soberly. “This kind, at least. What did she say?”

He closes his eyes, remembering the first time she had held his shaking body and whispered it in his ear. That had been about something stupid, he recalls now, not getting invited to a birthday party or something that mattered tremendously at the time and he hadn’t thought about in thirty years. There is hope for Georgie yet, he thinks as he opens his eyes. “She told me that people aren’t usually trying to hurt you. They’re just thinking more about themselves than you.”

“So you thought...”

“If they knew, they might make a different choice.” He makes a face and leaves it to her to accept or reject his conclusion. Their past suggests he is wrong—how many times, faced with a betrayal, has the other person seen the error of their ways?—but he cannot stop himself from hoping otherwise, that there are more roses than thorns in the world.

Rather than answer, though, she trails her hands to cup his cheeks, the corners of his mouth following the motion of her thumbs as they smooth up to his cheekbones. Drawing his head down to rest against hers, she speaks from a breath away. “Sometimes I forget how brave you are.”

“It’s not—”

“It _is_ ,” she persists, “it’s terribly brave to know that people are going to hurt you and choose to love them anyway. Because everybody does, don’t they? Even I—I love you more than my own life, and I’ve hurt you horribly more than once.”

“Yes,” he says, because what is the point in denying it? “And I’ve hurt you—I _have,_ Jemma,” he says over her protests, “I can be selfish too. But it’s not—it isn’t the most important thing, is it? Being hurt is the risk we take to have the reward of loving each other. I think it’s worth it.”

“Of _course_ it is.” She sighs again, her fingers twirling absentmindedly through the hair behind his ears. “One doesn’t stop picking roses just because they have thorns. One could leave them on the bush to grow uninhibited in their natural state, but—”

He takes her hands away from his face and holds them to his chest. Understanding what he means, she finishes with “all metaphors break down eventually, I suppose.”

“The problem with language instead of science,” he agrees, and she laughs.

“If only everything was as reliable.”

Though she’s smiling, there’s a shadow behind her words, and he knows that theory isn’t enough to remove the sting. Understanding why people hurt you and deciding that the benefit generally outweighs the cost can’t keep it from being painful when it happens, and—paradoxically—less so when it happens to someone you love instead of yourself. He looses her hand to draw her into the circle of his arms, smiling when she fits into the place that’s been hers for decades. This is worth everything, he thinks. No bravery about it at all. And that’s why he always makes the choice to believe people won’t disappoint you—think what he might have missed if he had learned his father’s lesson instead of his mother’s?

“Fitz?”

He rumbles an interrogative.

“Do you know what Georgie ordered from Amazon?”

“Opened the box myself.”

“Do we need to supervise?”

He considers the components, mentally combines them with the lab stock Georgie has access to, and pulls Jemma in tighter. “She’s all right for a bit,” he says.

“Good,” she says, and pushes up on her toes to give him a long, slow kiss.

“What’s that for?” he asks when she pulls away, slightly dazed even with so many years of enjoying her affection.

“The brownies, of course,” she says, sparkling up at him. “What other reason could I possibly have to think you’re the best man alive?”


End file.
